Nancy Edmonds Hanson

About 90 drivers propel Moorhead and Fargo buses throughout the metro area, including seven routes through Moorhead and 25 in Fargo.

As Moorhead’s population has boomed over the past 40 years, Lori Van Beek’s hand has been steering the buses.

Since she was named transit manager for the city’s side of Metropolitan Area Transit, she has directed the drive to improve transportation for the thousands who need – or prefer – to ride rather than drive. Much has changed since 1990, when she was named to the position, from federal and state regulations to the technology of tracking arrivals and paying fares. Some of the shifts, like the major impact that COVID had on public transportation, have been frustrating. But the woman who, as a little girl, rode city buses every day, says that she has enjoyed it all.

MATBUS, as the two-city transportation program is commonly known, is a collaboration with Moorhead’s neighbor west of the Red River. The two cities coordinate their public transportation programs – sharing facilities, vehicle purchasing and maintenance, and policy-making. They also share costs, with Moorhead assessed one-third and Fargo two-thirds of the operating budget and capital investment.

Lori and her Fargo counterpart, transit director Julie Bommelman, head separate operations but typically move forward as a team. Their two-city, two-state collaboration served more than 2.5 million adults and children every year until COVID trimmed numbers back. Each heads her own city’s program, including grants, funding and management of routes within its borders. They collaborate on operating policies and fare structures.

Moorhead pays one-third of the cost of the citywide system, with Fargo picking up the rest, based on relative size and ridership. “We own the building together,” Lori says of the MATBUS garage at 650 23rd St. N. in Fargo. Fargo built and owns the downtown Ground Transportation Center at 502 NP Ave. where riders change buses to carry on in their sister city; again, Moorhead covers one-third of its operating cost.

The two city operations coordinate their purchases of equipment, from buses to shelters. Fargo operates the paratransit program for the entire community. “That’s one of my biggest accomplishments,” the Moorhead manager acknowledges. “Moorhead passengers used to need to make one ride appointment to come to Fargo, then another to get where they were going.”

That same coordination has replaced Moorhead’s original Dial-a-Ride senior transportation program, which could cross the border only when to take residents to Fargo health-care facilities. Now the city works with the Fargo Park District’s senior ride program to provide transportation back and forth across the river.

Together, Lori and Bommelman’s operations contract with a national staffing firm, First Transit. The staffing firm is colocated along with the cities’ staffs in the transit garage. First Transit handles all hiring, training and management of the 91 drivers at the wheel of their joint fleet of  64 mass transit vehicles. Of that fleet, Moorhead operates 11 large buses, three smaller paratransit buses and four senior ride vans.

“Hiring drivers has been a real challenge since before the pandemic,” Lori reports. “We’re about 20 short right now, partly due to a lot of retirements and the difficulty of replacing them.” That has forced the reduction of night-time hours and the frequency of some routes. “We’re running until 10:15 now; last year it was 9:45,” she explains. But improvement is right around the corner: “We’ve been approved to go to 11:15 soon.”

Lori was a fan of city buses long before she joined the city’s staff in 1982 shortly after graduating from M State’s general secretary program. “My mother didn’t have a drivers license, so growing up in north Fargo, we did take the bus,” the Fargo North High grad says. “We could walk, I know, but we liked riding the bus better. When I got this job, I knew all about how many people didn’t drive.”

Those lessons were reinforced in the 1980s when, as a young employee of Moorhead’s  Planning, Transit and Community Development Department, she had surgery on her left knee. “I had a stick-shift car, so I couldn’t drive. I took the bus for a full year. I learned all about the system, and I made a lot of friendships.” One thing about riding the same buses every day, she notes: It’s very social. “Otherwise,” she says, “you put in your ear-buds and don’t respond.”

Seven years into her 40-year tenure with the city, Lori was named Moorhead’s fourth transit manager since MATBUS’s launch in 1976. Her office specialist, Jackie Engel, has been with her for 30 years. The newest member of the team is assistant transit planner and marketing specialist Taaren Haak.

In recent years, MATBUS has upgraded bus service with several high-tech advancements. “There was no technology when I started,” she observes. Now bus riders are accustomed to electronic fare boxes that enable them to pay with mobile tickets on their phones. They can plan their trips through Google, entering their destination and getting instructions on which routes will get them there. They can even watch buses’ progress as they approach with Route Match, a program that tracks them in real time through GPS.

Last year 344,000 passengers rode Moorhead’s buses. But that’s little more than half the totals from the days before COVID, when they recorded nearly 600,000 riders. During the same time, Fargo recorded almost 2 million; today that number is 1.2 million.

Who are those hundreds of thousands of riders? The short answer: Mostly those who don’t have drivers licenses. That includes those who have lost their licenses or cannot afford vehicles of their own, skewed heavily to older residents and those with disabilities.

College students represent another major market. “They used to make up 52% of our riders, but now it’s more like 25%,” Lori says. A big part of that change, she says, is due to online classes. Then there’s the “cool” factor, which for many outweighs the obvious financial advantage of forswearing driving to and from campus in their personal vehicle. “I couldn’t even convince my own son to take the bus, and we had a route going right by our house,” she laments.

Reflecting on her decades at the wheel of the public transportation system, Lori calls it a stressful job, with ever-changing federal and state rules tied to funding. But there’s a bright side: “The same things that make it stressful make it rewarding,” she says with a smile.

“Managing MATBUS has been fascinating. There’s always something interesting going on.”